1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to syndication, and more specifically to systems for expanding the functionality a flexibility of RSS and other syndicated media.
2. Description of Related Art
Really Simple Syndication (“RSS”) media presents an emerging trend in networked communications involving the direct production and manipulation of text and multimedia by end users.
The public sees this layer primarily in terms of blogging—that is, the act of individuals creating Web sites and adding to them more or less daily. By dramatically increasing production and sharing of Web-based content, the blogging movement now produces a virtual river of content—available continuously and with global circulation. Just as word processing empowered millions to create their own documents, blogging software has made it relatively easy for millions to produce their own Web sites and keep them continually updated. By the promotion of a simple underlying standard for sharing text and other media, blogging has popularized the “syndication” or passing on of content borrowed from others—extending the reach of any given blogger and further increasing the total quantity of information in circulation.
A number of companies have emerged as niche players targeting various aspects of syndicated data streams. For example, some companies such as FeedDemon, NewsGator, myYahoo (Yahoo), and Bloglines have focused on client-side aggregation and presentation. Companies such as Technorati, Google, and Feedster have focused on the complementary services of searching for data feeds of interest. Other companies have focused on technologies for providing syndicated data streams such as SixApart, Drupal, TypePad, Flickr, Picasa (Google), and Blogger (Google). Other companies have positioned themselves as content providers, including new companies such as Engadget, Weblogs Inc., Topix.net, and MySpace, as well as established media companies such as the New York Times and BBC. Of course, various generic Internet technologies are also relevant to the rapidly growing weblog data flow, such as BitTorrent or Akamai's EdgePlatform.
While offering significant advancement in terms of sharing and communication of news and other items, the RSS value chain remains weak in many areas, and could benefit from better integration and additional layers of functionality. For example, RSS is relatively weak in terms of presentation, search, signal, and network routing. Aggregators that centralize content use display formats that are widely criticized, despite a general agreement among users that they improve over conventional search engine displays. In its current form, RSS also fails to provide enterprise-class features such as security, privacy, data integrity, and quality of service.
Remarkably, the rapidly growing content pool and the wide array of associated services and software technologies have arisen without the benefit of industry standards or formal commercial agreement on protocols. Thus, the underlying RSS technology remains very rudimentary. There remains a need for enhanced data stream services, and for an improved user interface and client tools for managing, receiving, and creating syndicated data streams.